Honor View20 review: top phone at half the cost of an iPhone XS

The Honor View20 made by Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer at the centre of a political storm, offers a top-notch experience including a great camera for £500 – less than half the price of an iPhone XS.

Top-end class performance

The Honor View20 has the same processor as Huawei’s current king the Mate 20 Pro, and an option of either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. As such it is fast, powerful and snappy all round, matching the best of the rest powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, even in gaming.

The View20 is one of Honor’s first phones with its new Magic UI 2 software, which is the manufacturer’s version of Android 9 Pie.

The big fingerprint scanner on the back is well placed, accurate and very fast indeed – easily one of the best on the market.

The camera has been Honor’s biggest weak point in the past, but not any more.

The camera app is good too, and there are plenty of modes to have fun with, including a Pro mode for shooting in RAW, 960 frames-per-second slow motion video and a reasonable portrait mode, which can only be used when the camera can detect a face.

The notch obscures the time in the left corner when using Android Auto on the phone

There’s a tiny amount of uneven backlighting at the very bottom of the screen, which almost looks like shadow from the bezel

Sometimes the three navigation buttons were shunted slightly off to the left of the centre when held in portrait orientation

Honor has included a very useful button on the navigation bar to rotate the screen when you have auto-rotation disabled (as I have all the time)

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